Barracuda Networks acquires SignNow fueling cloud storage growth

In a bid to grow its user base and carve out a unique presence in the cloud-based content sharing space, Barracuda Networks on Wednesday announced that it has acquired SignNow, a leading mobile signing and document storage platform.

Barracuda Networks acquires SignNow for an undisclosed amount

SignNow allows users to sign for documents ‘in person’ from mobile phones and tablet computers, with information then shared on a common cloud-based platform. The service increases turnaround on products and allows enterprises to move towards a paperless operating model.

The company recently surpassed one million users, quadrupling its active users in the last year and representing over 100,000 small businesses and over half of the Fortune 500, which is fairly significant for Barracuda Networks as it aims to carve out a unique space in the cloud storage software-as-a-service market (SaaS) for it’s very own, called Copy.

Copy, which launched in February of this year, is an online file syncing, sharing and storage service built on Barracuda’s own cloud infrastructure, Barracuda Cloud.

SignNow may be an attractive feature enabling Barracuda to differentiate itself from the broad range of cloud-based store-and-share service providers already touting competitive products – Google, Dropbox and Box.com to name a few that have picked up steam in recent years.

Nevertheless, the company has demonstrated that it’s eager to contend. The day following Google’s announcement that it would expand the level of free storage to 15GB across its Drive, Gmail and Google+ Photos offerings, Barracuda launched an initiative called ‘Fair Storage For All’, which in addition to offering 15GB as standard free storage (up from 5GB) also lets Copy users control which files count against their storage capacity. This complements a unique referral programme run by the company, where users can earn 5GB of free storage each time they refer someone to the Copy service.

Barracuda has a long and reasonably successful history of offering secure backup services to both large enterprises and SMEs, and as the company moves from the back-end of backup & recovery to the front-end of store & share, it will be interesting to watch how it continues to differentiate itself in an increasingly saturated market of cloud storage service providers.

Jonathan BrandonJonathan Brandon is editor of Business Cloud News where he covers anything and everything cloud. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathanbrandon.

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